Introducing CREST and Graph API

Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partners can improve their experience through API Integration with the Office 365 services provided by Microsoft to monitor, service and manage customers. These API's are categorized based on the usage as CREST (Commerce REST API) and GRAPH (Azure Active Directory Graph API).

Purchase and manage orders and subscriptions of Microsoft offers for your customers

The CREST API is intended for programmatic management of customer and subscription life cycle. It is REST based API with no call backs.

In addition, the Azure Active Directory Graph API is used to perform tenant, user, domain, and license management.

Any operation through these API's requires a security token from AD before performing other operation.

A simple depiction below explains the token management from CREST perspective. Once the Customer token is available, the end user can perform multiple operations like creating a customer, order, subscription and entitlements apart from suspending and revoking subscriptions.

GRAPH on the other hand is a RESTful interface to Azure Active Directory, which is tenant specific and provides programmatic access to directory objects such as Users, Groups, Contacts, Tenant Information, Roles along with providing access to relationships like members, memberOf, manager, and directReports.

GRAPH requests use standard HTTP methods like GET, POST, PATCH and DELETE and support response through JSON, XML and standard HTTP status codes and uses OAuth 2.0 for authentication, app based role-based assignments and user authorization.

You can learn more about CREST and Graph API by reaching out to your ADM or via reference documentation on MSDN.

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